The U.S. intelligence agency has taken an interest in China's secret Shenlong spaceplane

The U.S. Department of Defense’s intelligence agency has released a new report on the development of China’s military space capabilities, with a separate section devoted to the secret reusable spacecraft Shenlong (“Divine Dragon”). The document features a rare orbital image of the spacecraft, captured by a Maxar satellite in 2024.

Shenlong is an unmanned, reusable spacecraft launched into orbit by a launch vehicle, capable of maneuvering in space and returning to Earth using a runway, like the American space shuttles or the Soviet Buran. 

According to intelligence reports, the spacecraft’s first test flight in 2020 lasted two days; but during the second and third flights, the spacecraft remained in space for more than 260 days, performing complex maneuvers involving rendezvous and manipulation of inspection satellites.

In February 2026, China launched Shenlong on its fourth mission, during which the spacecraft repeatedly released and re-captured a support satellite at a distance of several thousand kilometers. The U.S. views such tests as a means of refining technologies for inspecting, servicing, and potentially intercepting or neutralizing orbital objects. The primary U.S. counterpart to the Chinese spaceplane is the X-37B military unmanned spacecraft, which has been on its eighth classified long-duration flight since August 2025.

Source: U.S. Department of Defense Intelligence Agency report.

Beijing is concerned about the growing number of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites in the context of a potential war and is seeking ways to neutralize them.

Sergey Glazyev, an academician at the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev have proposed several ways to disable the Starlink satellite system used by Ukraine. Among the options they mentioned were electronic jamming, the physical destruction of satellites, the creation of space debris, and even a nuclear explosion in space.